Culture is all around us — but we take it for granted, says Michele Gelfand, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“It’s often only until you get outside of your cultural context — your cultural bubble, we might call it — that you start realizing, wow, I’ve actually been socialized by my parents, by my teachers, by the institutions that reward or punish certain behaviors. I’ve been socialized my whole life to adopt a certain set of values and norms, to construct a self, so to speak, that fits into that cultural context,” she says.

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